Generally, User Experience (UX or UEX) seeks to quantify an individual user's satisfaction with a product or service such as a networking application. In networking, End User Experience Monitoring (EUEM) tools conventionally focus on observations, i.e., tests, instead of monitoring, i.e., continuous feedback. For example, conventional EUEM tools focus on page load and response time over Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). While this approach can provide insight, there are limitations as these measurements may vary by time of day, location, etc., provide little input into remedial actions, are reactive and merely snapshots in time, etc. Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics Market (NPMD) tools allow for Information Technology (IT) operations to understand the performance of applications, the network and infrastructure components via network instrumentation. Additionally, these tools provide insight into the quality of end user experience. The goal of NPMD products is not only to monitor the network components to facilitate outage and degradation resolution but also to identify performance optimization opportunities. This is conducted via diagnostics, analytics, and debugging capabilities to complement additional monitoring of today's complex IT environments. Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is the monitoring and management of performance and availability of software applications. APM strives to detect and diagnose complex application performance problems to maintain an expected level of service.
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) goes beyond APM and EUEM. EUEM looks specifically at the human end-user or customer interaction with an application. APM focuses on the performance and availability of the application. DEM is the experience of all digital agents—human and machine—as they interact with enterprises' application and service portfolios. A problem with conventional DEM is the inability to obtain end-to-end data. Conventional DEM dataset sources include lightweight instrumentation of devices and endpoints, JavaScript injected web pages (Server side), network-extracted packets and flows (client side), synthetic transaction executions, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and social media feeds, etc. The lightweight instrumentation can include Web-page-injected snippets such as JavaScript code acting as mini-agents that capture and send data from an endpoint once a Web page has been rendered. Packet capture applications can include both custom hardware and software-based components that capture packets from the network and interpret protocol information. Operating System (OS)-resident agents can capture and send data directly from the endpoint or device. Synthetic transactions can be run as tests to obtain results for applications, services, or digital business processes. Finally, social-media-based information (including sentiment data), collective intelligence benchmarking, and API data feeds are being added to the DEM ingestion level.
Disadvantageously, the above approaches for data gathering for DEM are all reactive in the sense these techniques are implemented periodically or on demand. This is not real-time, continuous data that actually reflects the user's actual experiences, but rather reflects a synthetic transaction or a snapshot in time that may infer actual digital experience. For effective DEM, it is necessary to continuously capture data related to an end-to-end application including availability, latency, quality, etc. for monitoring, analyzing, and improving digital user experience. Stated differently, the conventional approaches include passive performance monitoring using techniques such as traffic sniffing and injection or active performance monitoring with a synthetic approach where network probes are used to simulate traffic. However, neither of these capture actual user experience.